Many Oppose New School Planned for Farm Site

Faced with swelling enrollment, school officials here say they might have to eliminate class-size reduction or put schools on double sessions unless a new campus is opened by summer 2001.

But plans to open a new school have already run into community opposition because the preferred elementary school site sits in the middle of a strawberry field, raising concerns about exposing children to pesticides.

“We are in crisis situation here,” said Oxnard Elementary School District Assistant Supt. Sandra Herrera. “The children aren’t waiting. They are already living in Oxnard and looking forward to attending school when they reach age 5. We have to provide housing for them.”

The school district’s dilemma involves the interplay of community growth, a shortage of acceptable sites for schools, growing concern about the effects of pesticides on children and the tenuous timing of school construction.

The issue could come to a head as soon as next month, when school district trustees consider an environmental report on the preferred site for Juan Laguna Soria School at the end of Emerson Road between Rose and Rice avenues in Oxnard’s southeast corner.

Already, the school district is beginning a community relations effort, visiting PTAs and service groups to urge support for Soria School and its preferred site.

Meanwhile, a group of environmentalists and farmers is urging the 17-school district to return to the drawing board and seek a better, potentially safer, location.

Convinced that agricultural lands where the fumigant methyl bromide is used are not safe places for children, opponents are considering a legal challenge to the Soria School site. They also fear that building a new school in farmland could induce more growth.

“There aren’t many more boilerplate, square school sites left,” said Kim Uhlich, an analyst with the Environmental Defense Center law office in Ventura. “School districts have to get more creative. We don’t have unlimited land, and we’re going to need more schools in the future.”

Lawyer Fred Rosenmund, who grows strawberries, beans and lettuce half a mile from the Soria site, said he fears that children could fall ill from methyl bromide use and other pesticide spraying on neighboring ranches.

“We’ll get the usual complaints that we’re creating problems, when the school district is actually the one putting children at risk by putting them in the middle of farm operations,” Rosenmund said. “I think the school district is going to expose themselves to litigation. When parents sue the farmers, the farmers will sue the district. The question becomes, why build there in the first place?”

School officials say they have few good choices. Within city limits, sites that are big enough for a school and far enough from railroad tracks and airport flight paths to keep kids out of harm’s way are hard to come by, Herrera said.

As if the siting dilemma weren’t complicated enough, Oxnard school officials have imposed a tight deadline to open the new school serving kindergartners through sixth-graders by June 2001.

By 2003, the district plans to open another campus, Thurgood Marshall School, in the city’s northwest quadrant. To keep Soria School construction on track, the school board wants to have a public hearing on the site in late March or early April.

If the preferred Soria site is picked, school officials will ask the Oxnard City Council and the Local Area Formation Committee to annex the unincorporated 14 acres into the city of Oxnard. Construction of the school is expected to take at least 18 months and will cost $11 million. That is about a fifth of the $57-million school bond passed in 1997.

As the clock ticks, demographic pressures surge.

Since the start of the 1992-93 school year, enrollment in the elementary school district has soared from 12,775 to 15,386 as the birth rate has grown and older families have sold their homes in Oxnard, ushering in many new young families. School officials expect at least 8% growth in the next five years, even if no more homes are built in Oxnard.

To meet demand, the Oxnard School District has built four new schools in the last eight years, Herrera said. Building Soria and Marshall schools was supposed to keep pace with enrollment growth for the next seven to 10 years.

That is, until class-size reduction further strained already crammed schools. The move to place primary-grade students in classes of 20 or fewer students required reconfiguring existing classrooms and adding portable ones--gobbling up space on campuses.

As a result, Oxnard trustees must pick from a number of difficult options:

Building a school where neighbors may not want it. Dismantling the popular class-size reduction program. Or running double sessions--where one batch of students is educated from early morning to early afternoon and a second batch is taught from early afternoon to early evening.

If the new schools are not opened on time, school board President Francisco J. Dominguez believes the quality of education will be degraded for Oxnard children.

“We will take all precautions to protect children from pesticide exposure,” Dominguez said. “There are regulations in place about when you can spray and giving adequate notice before spraying. We won’t do anything without considering the safety of children.”

A huge concern, he said, is building a school soon enough to maintain class-size reduction.

“If we’re not able to keep class-size reduction, that’s an issue of equality of opportunity for Oxnard children,” he said. “I don’t know that you want to sacrifice the quality of education for land.”